Flexibility key part of renovations

Steve Maxwell, The Citizen01.17.2013

Every human venture runs into problems and unpleasant surprises. Roadblocks happen and they're especially common whenever home improvements are involved. And the older your house is, the more fundamental and expensive your roadblocks are likely to be.

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A decent house managed well is my definition of successful home ownership, but this won't happen reliably without something that rarely gets airtime in the home-improvement world.

Whether or not you complete home improvements yourself or hire a pro, success or failure depends on something other than hands-on skill. Some of the ugliest homes got that way as overly practical people combined considerable manual skill with a large dose of poor judgment. And at the other end of the spectrum you'll find naturally klutzy people who've orchestrated the most stunning renovations, beginning with little more than a mess with a roof on top.

So what's the difference? What's the make-or-break foundation of true home-improvement success?

Every human venture runs into problems and unpleasant surprises. Roadblocks happen and they're especially common whenever home improvements are involved. And the older your house is, the more fundamental and expensive your roadblocks are likely to be. Take a typical kitchen renovation job in an older home as an example.

Let's say you've planned to rip out old cabinets, take out old flooring, then install ceramic tiles before new cabinets go in. The cabinets come off the wall easily enough, but things slow down as you spend the morning hacking at the old linoleum. There are five layers over the old subfloor - many more than you expected - and the pine subfloor is soft in the place where a washing machine had a slow leak for years. With things worse than you expected, what do you do with your schedule and expectations? It's decisions you make at pivotal moments like these that determine whether you'll end up with a good house or a bad one.

The thing about home-improvement disasters is that they rarely look like disasters in their embryonic state. What appears to be a little rot and unevenness of a subfloor, for instance, is very likely to cause total failure of your ceramic tiles down the road if ignored. And it's not just about kitchens and floors and tiles, either. Every project involves unpredictable, unforeseeable developments, and making the right choice about how to deal with them depends entirely on resisting the common and powerful emotion of impatience.

Before you started your kitchen job, you had your heart set on getting some kind of working kitchen back within a week. That was a reasonable goal, except that it was based on incomplete information. Now that you know you really should replace the subfloor, do you give in to the easy way out, or adjust your expectations? My kitchen example is just one instance, but the issues and strategies are universal.

The route to success in any venture is rarely a straight line. It almost always involves backing and forthing as new information comes in and new realizations appear. Home-improvement success is often based on your ability to say "no" to the timeline of your initial game plan, in favour of doing things optimally.

Notice I didn't say "perfectly". There is no such thing as absolute perfection in this world and trying to achieve it will drive you and any hired tradespeople crazy. That said, things can approach functional perfection and this is worth shooting for. Competent, professional builders understand the need to bend and flex in the pursuit of functional perfection, though many homeowners don't. It's an art, not a science, and often comes down to nothing more than the ability to endure short-term disappointment in favour of better long-term results.

Show me a person's home and you've shown me how they deal with roadblocks throughout their entire life. The ability to flex and optimize with the right measure of wisdom and patience as reality intrudes on our plan is where quality really comes from.

Steve Maxwell, syndicated home-improvement and woodworking columnist, has shared his DIY tips, how-to videos and product reviews since 1988. Follow him at SteveMaxwell.ca, on Facebook or @Maxwells_Tips on Twitter.

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